1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related generally to removal of contaminants or other undesirable constituents from rolled materials, such as fabrics, and, more particularly, to greatly accelerating the rate at which such contaminants or undesirable constituents may be cleaned from such parts by continuous exposure to high pressure cleaning fluids during rolling to expose single layers of material to the cleaning fluid to dissolve and carry away residual contaminants and entrain and carry away particulates.
2. Description of Related Art
Many thin material products, such as fabrics, paper, separator or filtration membranes, are handled by rolling a long strip into a roll. Materials in the form of a thread, tube, or wire are also handled in the same fashion. Usually, as part of the manufacturing process, one or several undesirable components must be removed from the material through a cleaning and extraction process. These components may be processing aids, such as lubricants, unreacted monomer, or sacrificial pore precursors, as would be found in some types of separator materials. A variety of cleaning and extraction processes are used for removing these components. Most of these cleaning and extraction processes use ozone-depleting, toxic, or flammable chemicals, thus creating a disposal problem both for the extracted component and the extraction medium.
In current supercritical cleaning and extraction processes used for fabrics, a roll of material is placed in the pressure chamber and processed in its stationary state. This technique generally requires long extraction times, due to the long diffusion path length found in large spiral-wound rolls of fabric. Extraction times exceeding eight hours are typical for 10 to 14 inch (25.4 to 35.6 cm) diameter rolls. As a result, system throughput is low and processing costs high.
Thus, there remains a need to provide an improved method for removing contaminants or undesirable constituents from rolls of fabric or other rolled material that avoids or minimizes the above mentioned disadvantage.